What you could do with $700,000,000,000
OR you could nationalize some mortgage related debt (aka “impaired assets”) that banks, credit unions, and pension funds hold. Using our tax dollars, of course.
- Give every person in the US $2,300 or give every household $6,200.
- Pay the income taxes of every American who makes $500,000 or less a year.
- Fully fund the Defense, Treasure, Education, State Veterans Affairs and Interior departments next year, as well as NASA.
- Buy gasoline for every car int he US for 16 months.
- Buy every NFL, NBA, and MLB team and build each one a new stadium - and pay your players $191 million a pieces for a year
- Create the 17th largest economy in the world - roughly equal to that of the Netherlands.
- Or you could pay off just 7% of the $9.8 trillion national debt. (via Time)
I’ve been keeping and eye on a lot of the news coming out of the US recently, and I thought the above post did i great job of using some interesting statistics to give some kind of perspective into the mind boggling amount of money involved in the AIG bailout which is happening at the moment.
The American Government was supposed to taking a hard line against companies like these fucking up, which they certainly did with Lehman Brothers. The result of that company collapsing a few weeks back was merely 15,000 job losses and a few million people who’s superannuation is now in much worse shape than it would have been. However, the collapse of a company the size of AIG would have had a profound impact on the global financial market so they get a ‘golden parachute’ paid for by the American taxpayers.
Click the links if you want to read a bit more about what the American International Group actually is:
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIG)
Or why it needs a 700 Billion dollar bail out:
(http://whatilearnd.com/post/50637969/aig-now-that-you-own-it-learn-about-it)
